Web conversations dictate destination branding

Destination brand strategy should be geared towards engaging in conversations and controlling how the destination is presented and changing the message about the destination to one never heard before is the only way to change the conversation about the destination. And the conversations have all moved to the Web.

Destination marketers traditionally may already have had relatively little control over the different aspects of their ‘product’. Google, web 2.0 and social media networking are now rapidly taking that away as well.

‘On today’s Web, everything begins with Google — and that’s driving a sea change in how brands are built and succeed. While brands remain vital online, the old top-down model of building them (think of a new magazine launch) is increasingly irrelevant to the Web. Instead, Google’s dominance allows and even encourages brands to be built from the bottom up, with their overall identity far less important than the little slices of themselves returned by Web searches and their position in search rankings.’ Wall Street Journal (22/11/2007)